Internet portals (or gateways) are specialized World Wide Web sites that provide a starting site for users accessing the Web. Typically, these portals provide globally useful content and searching capabilities. Portals primarily provide value by helping users find and use Web content.
Typical services offered by portal sites include a directory of Web sites, a facility to search for other sites, news, weather information, e-mail, stock quotes, phone and map information, etc. However, portals only provide the ability to search documents that have been made public by the publishers of the documents. Many documents are not available to these portals.
Many organizations have a document management policy for managing and maintaining internal private documents. Because these documents are intended to be private, they are not available to the public for searching via portals. Thus, if a searching party wishes to search both public and private documents, at least two search requests are required and at least two search results must be evaluated. Generating multiple search requests and evaluation of multiple search results can be time consuming and inefficient. Therefore, what is needed is an improved scheme for searching public and private documents.